Officials: 9/11 born in Germany

Indictment disputes plot began in Afghanistan

May 10, 2003|By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent.

HAMBURG, Germany — Prosecutors asserted Friday that the Sept. 11 hijacking plot that resulted in more than 3,000 deaths had its origins here in Hamburg and not in the former Afghanistan camps of Al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden, as many investigators believe.

The surprise assertion accompanied the prosecutors' announcement that they had formally charged a former engineering student from Morocco as an accomplice in 3,066 cases of murder--the approximate number of men, women and children believed to have died on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

The indictment, which had been expected, contains a compilation of circumstantial evidence purporting to show that 30-year-old Abdelghani Mzoudi was so close to the Hamburg hijackers, and so familiar with their beliefs and affairs, that he must have known at least some details of the Sept. 11 plot.

Mzoudi, the prosecutors charged, was as involved in the preparations for the attack, "right up to the last moment," as Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, three of the men who crashed the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

3rd suspect to face trial

Mzoudi thus becomes the third person to face trial for his alleged role in history's worst peacetime attack. The first, another former Moroccan student, Mounir El Motassadeq, was convicted here in February of complicity in the hijackings. A third man, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been charged by a federal grand jury in Virginia with having played a part in the Sept. 11 conspiracy.

Before he was arrested in October, Mzoudi acknowledged knowing Atta, the Sept. 11 plot leader, and several of the other Arab students who either died on Sept. 11 or have been accused of complicity in the attacks. But Mzoudi told a German magazine, Der Spiegel, that Atta and those around him rarely spoke about "private matters."

In a statement accompanying Mzoudi's indictment, the German prosecutors allege that the Hamburg cell, which they described as "isolated from the outside and operating conspiratorially," was formed by Atta and the others for the express purpose of waging a "holy war" against the United States.

The cell members, the statement said, "were characterized by an increasingly aggressive, radically anti-American and anti-Jewish position." Early in the summer of 1999, "they decided, under the leadership of Atta, to actively participate in the jihad by means of terrorist attacks against America. They devised the plan of killing thousands of people using hijacked airliners."

Most investigators believe the plan was spawned not by Atta and his cohorts in Hamburg but by senior members of bin Laden's staff in Afghanistan and then presented to Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah during their visit to bin Laden's Afghan training camps in the fall of 1999.

By contrast, the prosecutors maintain that Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah, along with a fourth man, Ramzi Binalshibh, went to Afghanistan to "prepare" themselves for the hijackings.

A second delegation from Hamburg that arrived in Afghanistan five months later that included Mzoudi and Motassadeq "primarily served the purpose" of informing bin Laden about the preparations for the hijackings, the prosecutors said.

No evidence to support the conceived-in-Hamburg theory emerged at the trial of Motassadeq, who according to a former Al Qaeda member, Shadi Abdullah, was seen in Afghanistan with Mzoudi and two other Hamburg students, Said Bahaji and Zakariya Essabar.

Bahaji and Essabar fled Hamburg for Pakistan days before Sept. 11 and remain fugitives. Binalshibh, who fled at the same time, was arrested in Pakistan last year and reportedly is undergoing U.S. interrogation.

Motassadeq, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison, testified at his trial that Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah had gone to Afghanistan in hopes of joining Muslim forces fighting Russian troops in Chechnya.

The evidence to support the prosecution's Sept. 11 theories presumably will be made public at Mzoudi's trial, which is expected to begin in August.

Alleged loan for flight school

Included in the prosecution's evidence is Mzoudi's alleged loan of about $900 to Essabar for a down payment on lessons at a Florida flight academy--lessons that Essabar, who reportedly intended to pilot the fourth hijacked plane, never took because he was denied a U.S. visa.

The prosecutors also allege that Mzoudi shielded the whereabouts of Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah while they were in Afghanistan, and helped hide al-Shehhi from his worried family back in the United Arab Emirates in the weeks before he left Germany for America.

Probably the most damning evidence to support the charge against Mzoudi of accessory to murder--stronger than any single piece of evidence in the Motassadeq case--is al-Shehhi's use of Mzoudi's Hamburg address and telephone number in his applications to flight training centers and on hotel registration cards in the U.S.